142 



of the south of Europe, it were to be wished, that 

 Mr Daudin had named the boas of America, 

 pythons, and the pythons of India, boas. The 

 first notions of an enormous reptile, that seizes 

 man, and even the great quadrupeds, breaks 

 their bones by twisting itself round their 

 bodies, and swallows goats and kids, came to 

 us from India and the coast of Guinea. How- 

 ever indifferent names may be, we can scarcely 

 admit the idea, that the hemisphere, in which 

 Virgil sung the torments of Laocoon, a fable 

 which the Greeks of Asia borrowed from much 

 more southern nations, does not possess the boa 

 constrictor. I will not augment the confusion 

 of zoological nomenclature by proposing new 

 changes, and shall confine myself to observing, 

 that at least the missionaries, and the latinized 

 Indians of the missions*, if not the vulgar among 

 the planters of Guyana, clearly distinguish the 

 traga-venados (devins, real boas, with simple 

 anal plates,) from the culebras de agua^f, water- 

 snakes, like the camudu (pythons with double anal 

 scales). The traga-venados have no transverse 

 bands on the back, but a chain of rhomboid or 

 hexagonal spots. Some species prefer the dry est 



a python, like that killed by the army of Regulus ? (Cuvier, 

 Reg. anim., vol. ii, p. 65.) 

 * See vol. iii, p. 239. 



t The great python of Java is also called ular sawa, which 

 means, in the Malay tongue, river serpent. 



